fotoLibra‘s Home Page images have always been a source of joy to picture buyers and general browsers alike.
We’ve had only one lingering worry. Because computers have horizontal screens, all our chosen images had to be Landscape.

And we’ve got just as many superb Portrait images, which we couldn’t show you.

Then we thought, hey, Instagram works well on mobiles and cellphones and tablets, and people tend to hold those things in vertical mode, so why don’t we upload some of our great Portrait format images to Instagram?

Good plan, we thought, patting ourselves on our shapely backs. So here goes. The first one went up earlier this week. Because it won’t click through to the fotoLibra site, each one will be credited as follows:“Film helicopter: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Kevin Fitzmaurice-Brown. You can licence this image and millions more through fotoLibra.com. #fotoLibra”

Of course they won’t all be photos of Film helicopter: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Kevin Fitzmaurice-Brown. There’ll be a different picture every day, probably including one of yours at some stage. But each image will finish “You can license this image through fotoLibra.com.”

So please go to Instagram, search for fotoLibrarian, and please LIKE every picture you see!

A word of comfort: each image will be small size, lo-res and watermarked so ongoing opportunities for illegal usage have been minimised.

I’m on instagram but hardly ever use it due to the large scale theft of images that is allegedly rife using that platform. I know watermarks offer some protection but not that much to someone who can remove them.

Hi Peter
The ‘images’ we post on Instagram are scarcely ‘images’ at all — they are mere representations of the actual full size originals we hold securely on our servers. My wife used the unflattering term “SWILL” to describe my amateurish photographs of follies many years ago, then justified herself by saying you could “See What It Looks Like”. So these are SWILL images of the real things. They are, as I said, lo-res, compressed, watermarked, small file size copies of the genuine article. For example the image we will be exhibiting tomorrow is 72 ppi, 308 x 600 pixels, watermarked and compressed by 50%, whereas the original asset is 300 ppi, 2625 x 5198 pixels, unwatermarked and uncompressed. But you are right to be cautious — Instagram in an attempt to reduce files sizes still further will strip all extraneous metadata such as copyright, credit, caption, keywords, description etc. What you see is all you see.

I tend to your thinking Colin, but it’s the way of the world today. Facebook is now worth six times as much as Belgravia which gives it some clout, but I’ll take Belgravia any day. As for piracy, see my reply to Peter Bolton above.

Hello Gwyn – duly created an Instagram account & found the fotolibra feed. However the images all seem square format and not portrait (which was the initial idea)- so on my phone the girl with the ‘bunny’ ears has those ears cropped out. Am I missing something?

Errrm … I think it’s me. I plunged straight into this on the basis that smartphones and tablets are generally held vertically, but it looks as if Instagram does some automated post-processing which turns our wonderful portrait images into lumpen square boxes. Damn. Now I have to rethink this.
But thank you for pointing it out!